American so-called “natural gas” (the mixture of hydrocarbons made up mostly of methane) production began to explode under President Barack Obama and has continued to increase under every president since. Liquified natural gas exports, which involve an energy intensive liquefaction process that enables the gas to be shipped, kicked off around 2016 and have also climbed steadily upwards every year. The main problem that the gas industry faces is not regulation, but markets: the rate of renewable adoption in Asia is exceeding all expectations and LNG markets are expected to be dramatically oversupplied in the coming years.
The industry has two possible approaches to managing this situation: limit supply by halting the construction of new LNG infrastructure or expand the market for LNG to absorb excess production while maintaining sustainable price levels.
President Donald Trump, whose energy secretary came to the administration directly from Liberty Energy, the second largest fracking company in the United States, has seemingly agreed to help the industry pursue the latter strategy, deploying U.S. economic power to entrench and grow demand for LNG around the world. Already by early February, Taiwan, India, and Japan had indicated that they will ramp up imports of U.S. LNG to appease the Trump administration and avoid threats of punitive tariffs. South Korea, Vietnam, and the European Union appear to be in similar situations, which Bill McKibben aptly describes in his newsletter as “shakedowns.”
Politicians here in Canada have been quick to distance themselves from Trump because of his threats to annex the country as a 51st state. But at the same time as they grandstand about opposing Trump and his plans for the world, they continue along as partners in his effort to grow the market for LNG by any means necessary, deploying Canadian soft power to support pipeline and gas companies with close ties to the Trump administration.
Of course, government intervention to expand markets—and specifically to expand markets for fossil fuels—is far from new: it is one of the defining features of the capitalist state. The widespread adoption of the automobile, for example, occurred not because of demand or its natural superiority to public transit (people hated them) but because of infrastructure decisions and state-mediated propaganda campaigns disseminated through educational systems that ultimately impelled people to buy cars. Even so, private vehicle adoption and the oil-heavy American lifestyle spread slowly outside the U.S. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Washington used the Marshall Plan to radically accelerate it, rebuilding Western Europe in ways that cemented its oil dependency to the great benefit of the U.S. firms that controlled the majority of oil flows around the world. The examples of this are endless, but the key point is that in important ways, the shape of markets is driven not by some exogenous human nature that defines “demand,” but by supply and the ability of firms and their state allies to create demand as needed. This distinction has profound consequences for understanding how change happens, why our economy has baked in overproduction, and, perhaps most importantly today, for understanding how we can mitigate climate change.
All of this is to say that the use of state power to create markets for domestically produced goods has been the norm for more than a century. What has changed is the political moment. Trump is brazenly leveraging threats to ensure there’s a long-term market for the most rapidly growing fossil fuel product in the world: fracked gas. Climate politics is rife with mystifications, but here, Trump is saying the quiet part out loud. In doing that, he is bringing the contradictions of Canadian climate policy clearly into view.
Our government claims to “believe” in climate change, and even to be a climate leader. But Canada has for years deployed soft power behind the scenes to help firms like TC Energy, the pipeline company behind Coastal GasLink, to lock other countries in to fossil fuel infrastructure, crowding out renewables and actively hindering the fight against global heating. A huge part of this project occurs in close collaboration with the U.S. government and its other allies, including through the Five Eyes intelligence network.
These actions aren’t just driven by overlapping interests, but also by overlapping personnel. TC Energy’s executive team is stacked with “dozens [of] connections between the natural gas giant and the incoming Trump administration,” according to the Investigative Journalism Foundation. TC was also the main driver of the proposed Prince Rupert Gas Transmission (PRGT) pipeline which is currently fighting legal challenges from First Nations and community groups. Last summer, TC sold PRGT to a joint venture between Western LNG, a small Houston-based (and Trump-aligned) firm, and the Nisga’a Lisims government, but many former TC staffers are pushing the project forward under its new ownership. The details of TC’s enduring stake under the sale agreement also remain unclear. PRGT and its proposed LNG export facility, Ksi Lisims, are both backed by American financial companies like Blackstone, which have close ties to Trump. Blackstone’s CEO, Steve Schwarzman, was a major supporter of his 2024 presidential campaign.
The Canadian fracked gas industry is not just aligned with the Trump administration and its foreign policy goals but imbricated within it. Unfortunately, so too is the Canadian state.
Trump’s brazenness means that Canadian politicians now must answer this question: are you actually opposed to the American project of fossil-fuelled fascism? Or are you simply blowing hot air to score cheap, nationalist political points, while behind the scenes you continue to work with the Trump administration and its allies to promote the expansion of fracked gas globally, reversing what little climate progress has been made?
A serious opposition to Trump would mean ending support for the expansion of the LNG industry, ceasing handouts to Trump-aligned corporate executives, and nullifying all coordination with U.S. military and diplomatic operations that seek to entrench gas dependence around the world.
Unsurprisingly, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre’s position is clear. His call for “shovel-ready zones” is a transparent Canadian rebrand of the Trump 2.0 anarcho-capitalism-meets-fossil-fuel-monopolies that offers Canadian energy giants everything they’ve asked for. Unfortunately, politicians on the other side of the narrow ideological spectrum we have in this country—namely, Prime Minister Mark Carney and British Columbia Premier David Eby—have been demonstrating just how thin their opposition to Trump really is. Eby is fast-tracking projects that will continue to ramp up production and export of fracked gas from the Montney Shale gas basin, and one of Prime Minister Carney’s first actions was to give $200 million to Cedar LNG, a new export project on BC’s northwest coast. Rather than working with other countries to ramp up production of renewables and disempower the U.S. by cutting the legs out from under the nascent LNG industry, Canada is continuing to align itself with the belligerent U.S. as world leaders in climate obstructionism.
The U.S. descent into fascism is a global crisis. But it’s also an opportunity for countries like Canada to break with America’s iron grip on global politics, and particularly, with its obstructionist streak on climate change. Will any party in Canada present a vision for a sustainable future, or are we doomed to follow our neighbours into an increasingly overheated authoritarian future defined by Western military dominance over anyone who might attempt to move away from oil and gas?
Nick Gottlieb is a climate writer based in northern BC and the author of the newsletter Sacred Headwaters. His work focuses on understanding the power dynamics driving today’s interrelated crises and exploring how they can be overcome.